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Finding Breast Cancer in a Drop of Blood

Scientists at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine are working to develop a test that can detect a breast cancer "fingerprint" in a single droplet of blood, thus reducing our dependence on mammography.

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MONDAY, April 9, 2012 — Screening for breast cancer has been the subject of some controversy in recent years, but if new research holds up, the mammogram debate could be a thing of the past in the not-so-distant future.

Researchers from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine are working to develop a new blood test that could someday reduce our dependence on mammography and change the way we diagnose breast cancer and other diseases.

A little more than 40 years ago, McGill physician Phil Gold, MD, PhD, identified a key protein biomarker called the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), which is normally produced only during the development of a fetus but is also present in the blood of people with certain cancers, including those of the colon, rectum, breast, pancreas, ovary, and lung. Unfortunately, some healthy people have this biomarker as well, so while doctors can use CEA levels to detect the return of cancer in people who have already been diagnosed, they’ve been unable thus far to develop a similar blood-based screening test that can diagnose the disease initially. That’s where the McGill research comes in.

The 'Fingerprint' of Cancer

“Attempts have been made to overcome this problem of person-to-person variability by seeking to establish a molecular ‘portrait’ of a person by measuring both the concentration of multiple proteins in the blood and identifying the signature molecules that, taken together, constitute a characteristic ‘fingerprint’ of cancer,” lead investigator David Juncker, PhD, told Science Daily. “However, no reliable set of biomarkers has been found, and no such test is available today. Our goal is to find a way around this.”

In pursuit of this goal, Dr. Juncker and his colleagues first analyzed other technologies that are commonly used to measure proteins in the blood. In doing so, they were able to determine the shortcomings of those tests — specifically, that the number of measurable proteins is limited and that the results are difficult to reproduce. Using this information, the team developed a new test using microfluidics (manipulation of a small volume of fluid, such as a drop of blood) and microarrays (scaling down one or more laboratory functions, such as blood separation and analysis, to a single, tiny chip). This test made it possible to measure as many protein biomarkers as desired — in this case, 32 — while also minimizing false readings.

The Future of Cancer Screening?

Collaborating with teams from McGill’s Goodman Cancer Research Centre, Juncker’s biomedical group next used the test to measure the profile of 32 specific proteins in the blood of 28 individuals, 17 of whom had a particular type of breast cancer. From these 32 proteins, the researchers were able to identify a subset of six that were specific to the patients with cancer and could be used to establish a so-called “fingerprint” for the disease.

“While this study needs to be repeated with additional markers and a greater diversity of patients and cancer subsets before such a test can be applied to clinical diagnosis, these results nonetheless underscore the exciting potential of this new technology,” Juncker said.

In particular, Juncker and his team hope to develop a handheld version of the test that can be used in a physician’s office using a single droplet of blood to detect breast cancer and other diseases at the earliest possible stage — and without the cost, inconvenience, or risk sometimes associated with mammograms.